Configuring software applications can be a difficult task. The difficulty in configuration such systems grows in complexity as the size of the software application increases. An example of a complex software application to configure is an enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) application. Efforts to configure such applications often involves a large number of employees and even consultants. These efforts string out over at least many months, and even multiple years. Further, modifying a large software application configuration or upgrading such an application can, depending on the size of the configuration modification project or scope of the application upgrade, involve equal amounts of time and cost as an initial implementation.
A major cause for the complexity of modifying and upgrading such software applications is that configuration settings are often stored in configuration tables. The configurations settings in these tables do not provide any context of what the configuration setting is for, other than by reference to a manual or from the experience of person modifying the setting. Thus, modifying application configurations often falls upon highly skilled and experienced individuals, such as consultant. However, such individuals or consultants may not have the intrinsic knowledge of an organization that utilizes the application. This causes the configuration efforts to take additional time and cost more.
These configuration settings are often spread across multiple tables, or other data structures. When configuring an application in a non-production environment, moving the configuration settings to another environment can be a large task by itself. Thus, configuring such applications is not only complex and time consuming, replicating the configuration settings from one environment, or application instance, to another is a large task unto itself.